Yuri Razgulyayev: Kyrghyzstan’s illegal Islamists operate in concert with Taliban

The Kyrghyz underground religious political party Khizbut Takhrir is connected with the Taliban movement, according to the National Security Service of this former Soviet Central-Asian republic located in the scenic Ala Tau mountains. The sources report that the illegal organization numbers as little as some 4,000 members. Largely, it consists of unemployed youth. At the same time, there are Moslem college students, businessmen, and even government officials there. The organization is believed to be most influential in the republic’s south, in the Osh and Jalal-Abad regions. Their missionaries’ activity has also been noted in the Chui Valley, where an underground printing-house has been spotted, specializing in hate-inciting literature. Simultaneously, a studio has been liquidated engaged in copying videocassettes containing directions and sermons calling for the overthrowing of the secular power of “infidels.” Several missionaries, carrying propaganda literature, have been detained in the Issyk-Kul regions. On average, dozens of the illegal party’s activists are detained in the republic each month. Criminal proceedings have been launched against 117 of them – they are accused of spreading extremist ideas. The other day, the republic secret services received an operative information of the party’s plans to organize large-scale actions in protest against US “misdeeds” in Afghanistan. In response, the leading Moslem organizations of Kyrghyzstan have decided to stir up work on unmasking the religious extremists’ evil objectives.

Yuri Razgulyayev PRAVDA.Ru Bishkek Kyrghyzstan

Read the original in Russian: http://www.pravda.ru/main/2001/10/31/33256.html